Two Slippers Are Sparkling Back Where They Belong

LOS ANGELES — It’s taken far more than three clicks of the heels to bring these ruby slippers back home.

Thirteen years ago, a pair of the famed red-sequined pumps from “The Wizard of Oz” were mysteriously stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the actress’ hometown. With no fingerprints or security camera footage to go by, the police were left with few clues pointing to whoever had broken in through a back entrance and smashed the plexiglass display case holding the shoes. The only thing left behind: a lone red sequin.

Now the hunt is over: The FBI announced Tuesday that the stolen slippers have been recovered.

Authorities said at a news conference in Minneapolis that their investigation was still in progress, and they did not name any suspects in the case or give an account of the theft. Officials asked anyone with information to contact the FBI.

Federal, local and private investigators have pursued a variety of theories over the years, and eventually a private donor offered a $1 million reward for locating the shoes, which were among a number worn by Garland in filming the 1939 movie. Three other pairs used in filming are known to survive.

Dozens of leads came in after the reward was announced, but none seemed to take investigators any closer to solving the crime.

Then, last summer, someone approached the insurance company that now owns the shoes, claiming to have information about the slippers and how they could be returned. It quickly became clear, officials said, that the person was trying to extort money from the company.

Investigators from the FBI’s art crime unit, along with other federal agents in Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, organized a sting operation to recover the slippers, which ended in Minneapolis. Authorities said they had not paid any reward money.

“There’s a certain romance in these types of schemes, and sometimes sophistication,” said Christopher Myers, a U.S. attorney for North Dakota, who is leading the case. “But at the end of the day, it’s theft.”

When the shoes were stolen on Aug. 28, 2005, they belonged to a collector in North Hollywood, California, and were on loan to the museum, which opened in 1975 in the house where Garland lived as a young child.

“These shoes are the holy grail of all Hollywood memorabilia,” said Rhys Thomas, the author of “The Ruby Slippers of Oz,” a book about the shoes used in the film. “There isn’t anything else that does more to evoke the power of belief,” said Thomas, who has tracked the case closely.

In “The Wizard of Oz,” the shoes appear magically on the feet of Dorothy Gale, played by Garland, after the Wicked Witch of the East is killed. The dead witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, insists that they are rightfully hers and pursues Dorothy through the film to get them back. Dorothy ultimately learns that the shoes have the power to transport her back home to Kansas, if she clicks them together three times while repeating the phrase, “There’s no place like home.”

In L. Frank Baum’s original book, the magic slippers are silver; MGM changed them to ruby red for the movie to take greater advantage of its color cinematography, which was still rare in 1939.

The movie shoes had a complicated history even before the 2005 theft. They were owned by a well-known collector, Michael Shaw, who bought them for $2,000 in 1970 from Kent Warner, a costumer who found them gathering dust in a studio warehouse when MGM was preparing to auction off old costumes and props in 1970. Shaw’s collection also included Dorothy’s gingham dress, the Wicked Witch’s pointed hat and a Munchkin outfit. Shaw regularly lent the shoes to museums for a fee of several thousand dollars, and often donated the proceeds to children’s charities. The Judy Garland Museum put the shoes on display in 2005 during an annual festival celebrating the actress. Strictly speaking, they are not a pair; the left and right shoes are slightly different sizes, and are considered to be the mates of the left and right shoes housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The Smithsonian took its shoes out of public display in 2017 and launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore them.

Authorities said Tuesday that the stolen shoes were recovered earlier this year, and that federal agents then took them to the Smithsonian for authentication. A conservator who has worked on the Smithsonian’s ruby slippers for the last two years concluded that the recovered shoes were authentic.

At the news conference Tuesday, the recovered shoes were displayed for reporters in a clear case, resting on a mound of blue velvet. An FBI official reminded a camera operator elbowing in for a shot of the shoes, “This is valuable evidence, so if we could all maintain some decent distance...”

Speculation has swirled around the case since the shoes disappeared from the museum in 2005. There were suggestions that teenage pranksters may have stolen the shoes and then panicked and discarded them. Suspicions were raised about whether the shoes might have been a counterfeit pair sent to the museum and then stolen as part of an insurance fraud; Shaw, the collector who lent the shoes, denied it.

Scott Johnson, the chief of the Grand Rapids police, said on Tuesday that investigators never quashed these speculative theories, even the ones they knew were false, because they believed that such speculation could help lead them to the shoes.

Officials declined to say why a federal prosecutor from Fargo, North Dakota — Myers — was leading the case.

What happens next is unclear. But it seems unlikely that the shoes would be going back to Shaw. The company that insured them paid him $800,000 for the loss, and is now their legal owner.

Shaw, who could not be reached for comment, said in a 2015 interview with Newsweek that “there’s more to my life than a pair of pumps.”